A bucksaw is a crosscut saw: it is designed to cut across the grain. The width of the blade is constant from the teeth to the back. It is meant to cut wood fibers that are under tension, and is thick so that it is more difficult to bend on the push stroke. It can be either a one or two-man saw. Coopers often use bucksaws in their work.
For those who practice bushcraft, cutting tools are essential, and the saw is one of the most useful tools in the woods. A few of the features of our bucksaw include comfortable handle contours, an arched center brace for added cutting clearance, and a blade which folds into the handles for quick & easy field assembly.
It was an oversight of mine not to put a photo of how the bucksaw folds in the article, yes it does fold in to the wood work like a Laplander. The two blade supports have a groove cut in to them with a table saw, the blade is fitted on a threaded bar which allows it to pivot in to the wood work.
A turnbuckle is a basic piece of rigging equipment that can be used in a diverse set of tension-related applications. It is a common rigging device that is used to adjust tension and reduce slack in a rope, cable, or similar tensioning assembly. The thin, flexible blade of a bucksaw was said to be strained along the margin of its frame. Historically, that strain was created using a central brace which greatly limited the use and scope of the tool; the central brace got in the way. So by utilizing a turnbuckle to create the tension, the bucksaw could have a more sturdy blade. This turnbuckle method of straining a bucksaw appeared in bucksaw patents as early as that awarded in 1869 to Daniel and Edwin Moore, of Brooklyn, New York.
In the old Maine Development Commission we had a few able hucksters who sat around agood deal with their feet on their desks, and every once in a while they would unlimber their recumbency and uncork some wild-eyed scheme intended to attract paying customers to the State of Maine. My favorite of these thinker-uppers was Earle Doucette -- we called him the Earl of Doucette -- but it was often difficult to tell just which part of a scheme was Earle's, since the other jokers were in cahoots. I think the bucksaw contest was Earle's all the way.
Earle engineered a world's championship bucksaw contest, to be well covered by the press and the Fox Movietone News, and various regional champions from around the world entered one by one with cumulative publicity. I'm not sure if the contest was held at the New York or the Boston sportsman's show, but the first one was such a success it was repeated year after year in a good many places. The regional champion from Minnesota may or may not have been a bona fide Minnesotan, but releases from Augusta (Maine) quoted him accurately as saying, "Ay tank Ay ban going to win." After preliminaries that lasted several weeks, Earle introduced the Maine entrant: Perry Greene.
Perry was a broad-shouldered woodsman who guided and doubled as one of Earle's "characters," and the papers had pictures of Perry "in training." Perry not only won the bucksaw contest, but he won it handily and as Queen Victoria was told, "There is no second." Earle smiled and smiled and put his feet back up on his desk.
What dance is wilder than that the dead leaves dance, made frantic byPage 189the winds of March? What music more welcome than the bucksaw sound of the hylas chorusing a song in praise of spring in the flooded bottom-lands and marshy pools of the valleys? Or what is rosier than the rosy tassels that tag the sugar tree when it lifts itself like a banner unfurled in the very forefront of the advancing armies of spring?
 38c6e68cf9